


Nuts in Florida

by agoodwoman



Series: The In Between [2]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Fight the Future, MSR, RST, Two Fathers, UST, X Files Season 6, agua mala, one son, prompt, season 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-07-30
Packaged: 2020-07-07 23:27:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19859782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agoodwoman/pseuds/agoodwoman
Summary: After their encounter in Antarctica and Mulder's reaction to Diana in Two Father's One Son, things come to blows after they are evacuated to Tallahassee.





	1. The Airport

**Author's Note:**

> This began as a prompt from a pal: Summer, Shiner Bock, chewing gum, fireworks, a mirror, Mulder has to climb a tree and turned into this.
> 
> Thanks to my beta reader M for all her help.

Dana Scully stood at the ticket counter for American Airlines with saltwater in her hair and clinging to her skin. It was ten fifty-two a.m. but after a long night of delivering a baby with a gun to her head while fighting off an invisible sea monster, it felt like the middle of the night.

She wanted a shower, a cold beer and maybe something on her bad foods list that Mulder tried to tempt her with the last time they were at an airport.

The line behind her was full of men, women and children who had survived the worst of the storm and were waiting to get the hell out of Florida. Scully didn’t blame them.

“Ma’am, we aren’t flying to Washington, D.C. today due to the storm. Our planes are just getting folks out of the area,” the attendant repeated, but Scully still didn’t believe it. “We only have a small number of planes shuttling folks to Tallahassee where our planes will take you to your chosen final destination.”

“That seems redundant,” Mulder noted as he pulled a sunflower seed out of his pocket and put it between his teeth.

“Sir, please understand that many people have lost their homes,” the clerk scolded him. “The city of Tallahassee is one of the few cities that were able to stay sheltered from this terrible tragedy.”

Being scolded by an American Airlines attendant about citizens being displaced by the storm put a lot into perspective for her, and she placed her government-issued credit card on the counter.

“Two tickets to Tallahassee, please,” Scully requested breathily, and Mulder ran a hand through his spiky hair while rolling his eyes.

The tickets printed up, and the attendant smiled politely at Scully. “Please proceed to gate 42. We will not be offering baggage check on this flight so you will need to bring your luggage with you.”

Mulder nudged Scully with his shoulder. “Good thing we only brought carry-ons.”

“Enjoy your flight. Thank-you for choosing American Airlines,” the attendant bid them goodbye and gave a sharp look to Mulder.

As they walked towards security, Scully glanced up to Mulder who was fishing for another seed in his jacket pocket.

“Aren’t those all ruined by now?” she questioned.

Mulder handed her one. “I got a fresh pack while you were in the bathroom at Walgreens.”

Scully nodded. “Oh.”

After they passed through security with the other water-logged citizens of Goodland, Naples, and Golden Gate, Scully scanned the area for someplace to eat. So far it, was only kiosks for trinkets that would fall apart before they unpacked them at home.

“Why would the state of Florida order an evacuation of this entire county?” Scully commented as they walked without discussion to the nearest restaurant.

Mulder adjusted the bag on his shoulder. “Probably to make sure that thing is out of the pipes.”

She arched an eyebrow at him but said nothing. They approached the Applebees front podium, and Mulder held up two fingers.

“Table for two, please,” he requested.

The hostess looked behind her through the restaurant and then back to him. “We are being asked to save tables for parties of four or more. Will a spot at the bar be okay?”

Mulder shrugged. “It’s that or not come in… So, sure.”

The hostess smiled. “Right this way!”

They parked their bags at their feet, and Scully tried to tuck her feet on the footrest that seemed to be an inch out of reach. She wiggled herself towards the backrest using the small arms. When she glanced to Mulder, he was smiling to himself as he watched her struggle.

“It’s not funny,” she scolded him quietly, and he cocked an eyebrow with his shit-eating grin that wouldn’t go away.

“Evening folks,” the bartender greeted as he put two coasters down. “What’ll it be?”

“Bottled water please,” Scully requested.

Mulder held up two fingers. “Make that two. What do you have on tap?”

The bartender leaned an elbow on the stainless steel counter and waved his other hand to the long line of handles. “Pretty much everything.”

“Shiner Bock?” Mulder offered Scully, and she nodded. “Two pints, please.”

The bartender nodded and began to pour their beverages while Scully opened the plastic menu to peruse her options.

“Salads are the next page,” Mulder commented as he flipped the menu for her.

She gave him a warning look and flipped it back. “I’m not sure if you’re making a comment about my waistline, but I was planning to devour the Super Macho Nachos this evening. If you’re good, I’ll let you watch me do it.”

“As opposed to?”

“Making you sit at the other end of the bar and ignoring you for the next three hours,” she muttered and smiled politely at their bartender. “Thank-you. I’d like the Super Macho Nachos with an extra side of guacamole and no olives please.”

The bartender nodded and looked to Mulder.

“Three pounds of hot wings and a veggie plate,” he requested. Mulder looked around the restaurant. “Better make it four… but I want the last one to be honey garlic.”

The bartender gave them a mock salute and walked across the bar to punch in their order into the POS terminal.

He held his glass up to Scully. “To Leroy Walter Villareal Suarez, Junior. Who would not have arrived in this world without Dana Katherine Scully, M.D. and Special Agent with the FBI.”

Scully laughed and clinked her glass against his. “To Leroy what’s his name.”

Mulder took a sip of his beer and licked the foam off his upper lip. They sat at the bar while other single and paired up travellers began to join them at the bar.

Soon after they were surrounded by other patrons, the bartender returned with the veggie plate, two side plates and a few napkins.

Mulder held up a broccoli piece to her. “Rest in peace Shipley family.”

Scully touched her own broccoli to his, and they dunked their vegetables into the ranch dip.

Clinking spoons, glasses, pieces of food, coffee cups or random items together had become a common practice between the FBI partners. Sometimes it felt flirtatious and other times it felt like a peace offering when they were at odds.

As she took a bite and looked around the restaurant that was beginning to fill with families, she was grateful for the lack of dill in the dressing. For all the dill pickles she devoured at random diners across the country, and the occasional dill pickle chip, she never could stand fresh dill in her ranch dressing. During their first year, she made a comment about such a distaste for dill in the creamy condiment and was pleased when Mulder agreed with her with a fervour he usually reserved for grey Reciculans.

Coming off of their recent case in Kroner, Kansas, Mulder had been ecstatic as locals continued to assume that Scully was his wife. He was touchy, in her space and delighted as she checked him for head trauma with a slight bulge in his jeans. She might have indulged more if the pain of Mulder continuing to play nice with Diana Fowley wasn’t rubbing her the wrong way.

All he had to do was to be on her side instead of blatantly getting aroused by her naked body in the decontamination shower and then telling her to play nice after the circus Fowley had put them through.

Truth be told, if Fowley had behaved differently or Mulder had stopped making her feel so confused about where they stood romantically, Diana Fowley might have been a possible ally to Scully. The women Scully worked with were so few and far between however, her alliance with the Cigarette Smoking Man, also known as CGB Spender, created a barrier of distrust for her. That alliance didn’t seem to bother Mulder.

Instead of finding some camaraderie with her, she was filled with jealousy and insecurities. It didn’t help that this woman was six inches taller than her without heels and had an insight into Mulder’s past Scully was still closed off from.

“Where did you go?” Mulder asked and took a long swig of his beer.

Scully shrugged. “Just thinking about the last year.”

Mulder dipped a baby carrot into the dip and popped it in his mouth. As he chewed, she could see his mind deciding what to say next.

“Skinner called and has informed me that we have until the end of business day tomorrow to get back to Washington,” Scully informed him. She took two gulps of her beer, and licked the foamy head from her upper lip and tried to mask a small burp. “I think we’ll be able to book a flight-”

“What about the last year?” he interrupted.

Scully dragged a grape tomato through the dip and popped it in her mouth to buy herself some time. When she swallowed, she looked at Mulder and raised an eyebrow. “We’re a long way from Antarctica.”

Mulder’s eyebrows shot up. She had a feeling that he was playing chicken about bringing up what happened out there. She thought he would have mentioned it countless times but instead, he yelled it at her at the edge of a desert in New Mexico under the scorching heat.

Instead of, ‘Hey Scully, maybe we could talk about the almost-kiss in my hallway that might have been a mistake? Or remember when I dressed your naked body? Do you want to talk about how we had to huddle barely dressed, in a sleeping bag for twelve hours in a snowcat until we were rescued? Oh yeah, and we had a lot of sex during that cold night?’ All she had was radio silence from him on the matter completely, which was odd because Mulder never shut up about anything in his life.

“We are a _long_ way from Antarctica,” he agreed finally. He finished off the last of his pint and set it down to rub his hands on his jeans. “I think I want to wash my hands before we dive into nachos and wings.”

“I’ll wait and go after you,” she offered, attempting to mask her frustration that her comment brought them no closer to discussing what happened.

Mulder had seen her in a state of undress three times in the last year. Four times, if she included the accidental peep show she gave him when they were last forced to share a room in Kroner. She wasn’t entirely convinced he didn’t hear her say ‘just a minute’ through the thin walls of the small town establishment, but Mulder wasn’t a creep. He just had really terrible timing.

“Another?” the bartender offered as he pointed to Mulder’s empty glass and hers with only a third left.

“He will,” Scully confirmed. “I think I’d rather have a margarita on the rocks.”

“Top shelf?” he asked, and Scully nodded.

If she was going to get through this night with Mulder in an Applebees until their flight, Scully would need top-shelf tequila. Sorry, Shiner Bock.

The bartender set her drink down in front of her as Mulder returned.

“You upgraded without me?” he almost whined.

“Did you want a margarita on the rocks?” she asked, and he shrugged.

The bartender set the empty glass back on the bar. “What’ll it be, man?”

Mulder looked at Scully’s mouth as she licked the salt off the rim. “I’ll get one, too.”

A waitress came around behind them and set the platter of Macho Nachos in front of Scully. Another waitress set the wings in front of Mulder with some hand wipes.

“Enjoy!” they departed in unison.

“Nachos or wings first?” he asked as he moved the basket of wings away to make room for his small plate.

“Mix of both,” she decided and held up her hands. “I’ll be right back.”

Scully took the opportunity to use the bathroom first. As she washed her hands, she looked at her reflection in the mirror. Her makeup was almost gone, her hair was wild and curly from the water and the clothes she had changed into didn’t alter that her body needed a proper shower. That would have to wait until they got to Tallahassee.

Sometimes she wondered if Mulder looked at her and saw the woman who was naked underneath him in a snowcat, writhing in pleasure, or if he only saw a mistake they made in hopes of not freezing to death.

She could close her eyes and still feel him move inside of her. It had been almost half a year, but the man had left his mark. Everything he did to her was burned on her skin.

She had to stop thinking about this topic. It would not help her behave rationally or appropriately if she let it linger in her mind while she had alcohol in her system.

As she made her way back to their spot at the bar, Scully used the footrest along the bottom of the bar and launched herself into the chair. She landed with a soft thud on the seat and smiled proudly at Mulder.

He was waiting to taste his lime drink and held up the glass to her. “To your skilled doctor hands.”

There was a definite leer in his voice there. Maybe he was thinking about Antarctica activities too.

“Yes,” Scully said as she looked at her hands open in front of her. “To _these_ hands.”

They shared a laugh and took a drink of their margaritas in unison.

Scully eyed the plate of nachos quizzically to decide how best to dive into the cheese, corn tortilla chips, tomatoes and green onions.

“Maybe go at it from the side,” Mulder offered as he picked up his first hot wing.

They were eating finger food and enjoying each other’s company now, which was a long shot from where they had been this last year. The first time she felt an inkling of their lives being back to normal was at Christmas and not again until she was shot by Payton Ritter.

After she returned to work, Mulder stopped tiptoeing around her, and she felt the coldness and frustration return in his behaviour.

Now, she felt like they were back at square one. Her feelings were still hurt, and Mulder was being an idiot.

Scully looked at Mulder. “I think the top is better.”

Mulder gave a look that said he could have supplied any number of innuendos, and she laughed.

The chips were warm from the oven, the cheese was just stringy enough and somewhere in the middle of eating her Macho Nachos, another margarita was set down in front of her.

Mulder held up a hot wing to her. “Fancy some spicy meat?”

Her fingers were greasy from the cheese so she leaned over and took a bite of the small drumstick in his hand, leaving half the meat still on the bone. Doing exactly what she anticipated, Mulder put the wing in his mouth and polished off the rest.

“Thanks,” she quipped and offered him a chip with salsa, guacamole, vegetables and cheese. “Macho Nacho for the big macho man?”

Mulder pulled her wrist towards him and proceeded to put the entire thing in his mouth. In a brazen moment of alcohol-induced inappropriateness, he took her thumb and proceeded to lick the sour cream off it.

“I still can’t believe you called me that,” he said through a mouthful of chips.

Scully shrugged. “I meant it. I still kind of do…”

He sighed and took a sip of his drink. “You can drive any time you want. I just know you prefer to drive stick.”

She furrowed her brow. “I’ll do either.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” he muttered and popped a tomato in his mouth.

They ate in silence for a beat as she considered what the underlying conversation was. An airport announcement cut off the music in the restaurant to let passengers know there would be an hour delay on the next two upcoming flights to Tallahassee out of gates 42 and 43.

“Another round for me and the lady,” Mulder requested as the families in Applebees groaned.

The bartender put three pints of beer up on the bar and pointed to Mulder to indicate he would be right with them. He took out a martini shaker as tickets started to print up near him and chilled three glasses while he mixed something violet.

“Did you ever waitress or bartend in college?” Mulder asked. "I feel like I should know this about you by now."

“Summers off from med school, I worked at a family restaurant,” she replied. “We served beer, wine and some cocktails but nothing like what he’s doing. What about you?”

“I did landscaping for a company on the Cape,” he replied.

“Really?”

That didn’t seem right.

Mulder nodded and handed the bartender a ten as their drinks set down.

“I thought you started a bill?” Scully asked.

“He’s working hard, Scully,” Mulder admonished her gently. “Trying to keep him motivated.”

“Something you learned from your years going to country club dinners?” she commented, and he nodded. “Really?”

Mulder finished off his drink and took her empty glass to put them to the side. Scully was looking at him with disbelief she usually reserved for his wild theories. 

“Sure. I’m from an upper-class family, but I also worked summers," he affirmed, and Scully clenched her chin, saying nothing. "Why is that surprising?”

She shrugged. “Because it is. I was so sure that you spent your summers volunteering at kids camps or something.”

Mulder’s cheeks pinked a little. “I did that in high school. By the time I was in college, I realized I could make better money and not be somewhere I was going to be eaten alive by bugs if I worked for the landscaper. I learned all about the different kinds of grass.”

She felt a little better for guessing something right. “Name three different kinds of grass.”

“Kentucky Bluegrass, Zoysia Grass, Bermuda Grass and Perennial Ryegrass,” he listed.

“That’s four,” she reminded him.

“I always like to do more than what’s expected of me,” he leered.

That was definitely a come-on or a reminder of whatever the hell they got up to in Antarctica. The man made her come more than once each time they had sex, and she never forgot it.

“Are you going to be this nice to me when we get back to Washington, or is this specific to Florida and this Applebees?” Scully asked.

Mulder put a hot wing on her plate. “I don’t know. Is it making you want to be nice to me?”

She always thought she was nice to him. She certainly tried to be patient, understanding and supportive but maybe in the last year, there was less of that. They had been on manure duty for a while and her patience with his ideas that all cases could potentially be an X-File wasted on Jeffrey Spender was growing thin.

Scully sat up a little straighter. “Perhaps.”

Mulder shrugged. “I guess I’ll take it.”

An hour and a half later, they had worn out their welcome (they were cut off) from the bartender and sent to their gate. Their bartender explained that after so many drinks, the airlines won’t allow you to board your flight. That made enough sense for her feelings not to get hurt. Mulder bought two more bottles of water a piece for them, and she left a generous tip for the bartender.

“I’ll pay you back my half when we get to D.C.,” Scully offered as they waited at their gate.

“Nah,” he declined with a wave of his hand. “Next time we’re stuck in a small town airport Applebees it can be on your dime.”

“Are you kidding me?” she said with mock disapproval. “I’m billing that shit to the government.”

Mulder laughed, and his hand brushed hers as they walked towards their gate. They found seats close to the flight attendant’s desk and an outlet. He stretched his arm across the back of Scully’s chair and set his right ankle on his left knee, spreading out in a way that took up more space than necessary.

“That’s specific,” she commented and hiccuped before taking a sip of her water.

She looked up from the bottle in her hands to see Mulder studying her under the protection of the space he took up. “What?”

He shook his head with a grin. “Nothing.”

There was something going on in his mind. She could tell by the way he was watching her but with three… no, four drinks under her belt, she didn’t want to guess what it was.

Scully pulled a small book out of the front pouch of her carry-on bag and decided if Mulder was going to watch her, he could watch her read. About three pages into ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring,’ her lids felt heavy, and she found herself falling asleep on Mulder’s shoulder.

***** *** *****

Three hours later, Scully was finally standing at the airport shuttle stop with her hotel room voucher in hand and a mild headache from tequila and beer mixing in her system. It was only four fifteen in the afternoon and was arguably one of the longest of her life.

Mulder approached with another bottle of water and two apples.

“Where did you get those?” she asked with delight.

Mulder polished one off and handed it to her. “They’re giving them out to us refugees.”

“Thank you,” she breathed and took a bite.

Mulder nodded towards the voucher in her hand. “We’re all set?”

“Two rooms at the La Quinta Inn booked under our names,” Scully reported. "We need to supply a credit card for any damages, but this is on the state of Florida since they kicked us out of Goodland."

Mulder nodded in appreciation and took a bite of his apple. He pointed with the fruit in hand towards a man shuffling his feet across the thoroughfare. “The driver of the shuttle was having a smoke when I asked. We should be leaving in a few.”

Scully nodded in appreciation. “I want a shower, I want another shower and I want something that doesn’t cause heartburn in my stomach.”

“That rules out the Chinese I was thinking of getting us,” Mulder commented.

“Oooh Almond Chicken sounds amazing right now,” she breathed. “Maybe pizza?”

“I’m easy with whatever. You can choose, but keep in mind that Florida is ripe with fresh fruit everywhere. I’ll climb a tree nearby and get us some oranges to balance all this out,” he offered, and she laughed. “Really. Your request is... no wait, your wish is my command. That's how it goes, right?”

Scully laughed and Mulder beamed at her.   
  
“That would be nice, actually,” she admitted, and he nodded once as though they had just sealed the deal.

She found herself swaying in exhaustion and yawned between bites of her apple. Mulder put his arm across her shoulders and pulled her slightly towards him to give her something to lean against.

As the driver approached them with the last bits of his cigarette smoke exiting his mouth, he greeted everyone with a smile. “Okay folks. For those of you going to La Quinta, I have bad news.”

The crowd groaned. “They overbooked by three rooms. Two groups of you will have to get a voucher for another hotel. It was first come first serve so the people with vouchers 3498, 3499 and 3500 will need to go back inside. Another travel liaison will be able to arrange accommodations for you.”

The crowd was silent as they contemplated their options. Two men standing in wrinkled business suits, holding briefcases with obvious five o’clock shadow looked to one another.

One of the men held up their hands. “We can share for the night.”

The crowd clapped at their offer, and a couple who had been eyeing their ticket crossed the group to retrieve their new voucher from one of the businessmen.

Scully noted a family standing at the edge of the group while the mother and father eyed their voucher with worry written across their faces. She nudged him, and he looked down at her without moving his arm around her.

“What?” he whispered.

“We should-”

“We can share,” Mulder offered to the crowd, and the pre-teenage boy from the family ran to Mulder to get his voucher.

“Thanks, mister,” he whispered, and the crowd clapped again.

Two women standing near the driver spoke quietly, and one held up her voucher. “Us, too. We can share.”

An older gentleman in his 70s walked slowly towards the young women, and the crowd seemed pleased with themselves for the community of giving they had created.

“Well, with that all sorted, let’s go!” the driver announced, and the crowd formed into a line to get onto the shuttle bus.

Mulder and Scully, the businessmen and women were granted to stand at the front of the line. Mulder pulled her into the first row of seats as soon as she got up the steps.

She assumed he wanted to get off the bus first to ensure he could secure a room with two beds. Scully retrieved her cell phone from her jacket and checked her messages. Three missed calls from Skinner, but the time stamp was before she answered at the airport. If she called to tell their boss that they were sharing a room in Tallahassee, there might be other repercussions than their little side trip to see a hurricane in action.

As the bus bumped along the highway away from the Tallahassee International Airport, Scully found herself lulling into sleep after a long twenty-four hours.

Her nap was brief when the shuttle came to an abrupt stop at the light at the intersection near their hotel. Mulder was rubbing his hand soothingly across her arm as he looked out the window, and she wondered if his actions were intentional or not.

Scully had grown accustomed to Mulder’s constant touching and invasion of her personal space. Truth be told, half the reason they spoke in such close quarters in hushed tones was because if anyone around them heard what they were discussing, they would both end up in a mental health ward or cause mass panic in public.

As she lifted her head from Mulder’s shoulder, she glanced over to the wound on his neck that she had dressed with the paramedics kit in the back of an ambulance.

“We’re here,” he whispered to her quietly and she pulled on the bandage.

The wound stopped oozing and the small tentacle shards that had imbedded into his neck had all been removed.

“Do you want me to get you some painkillers for your neck?” she offered and he nodded. “I’m sure there has to be a pharmacy nearby.”

“We drove by a Walgreens. It’s a ten-minute walk,” he replied and she nodded.

The bus pulled under the portico just as the rain began to fall in a long steady stream that only existed in a Florida summer. Mulder’s lips pulled tight, and she tried her best to stifle a laugh. He turned his head slowly to look at her, and she covered her mouth as she ducked her head down.

“Is this funny to you?” he asked tersely. His tone set her off, and she let out a giggle. “This weather is _funny_ to you?”

Scully’s laughter erupted through the bus, and she shrugged. “I don’t know why it’s funny.”

The bus driver opened the door, and Mulder shook his head at her in mock disapproval. It didn’t help the fit of giggles that had taken over.

As they walked into the lobby of the motel, Mulder put his hand on her lower back to reach the front desk quickly.

“Welcome to La Quinta by Wyndham. We are happy to accommodate you folks after the hurricane. Do you have your voucher ready?” the clerk asked in a way that was so well-rehearsed like the opening lines of a flight attendant’s security speech.

Mulder put his voucher on the counter. “Do you have a room with two beds?”

“I’m sorry sir, couples are being put in rooms with a king-sized bed to make room for the families being placed here,” the woman said with an upbeat tone that had been perfected by obvious years in the hospitality industry. She began typing in some information. “May I have both of your ID’s and one major credit card?”

“We’re not a-”

“Scully, show her your damn ID,” Mulder cut her off.

Scully’s cheeks flushed as she dug into her bag for her wallet. At least in Kroner, they had two beds to sleep in separately while they awkwardly tried to ignore the other as they fell asleep.

She took a calming breath as Mulder placed his personal credit card on the counter and glanced around to the people waiting in line behind them.

If she took the hours it would take to explain to Holly of La Quinta by Wyndham what their relationship status was, it would only compound the frustration and exhaustion the rest of the folks waiting to check in were suffering from. One night in a king-sized bed with Mulder was survivable.

If Scully was being honest with herself, having sex in a snowcat wasn’t the problem for them in Antarctica. They could have left the encounter in the middle of nowhere and ignored it happened completely. It was a cold night where they were trying to make it through sub-zero temperatures. The act itself was for survival.

They managed to survive in a snowcat in Antarctica, and they could survive this too.

Within two hours of arriving at Casey Station, they performed more intimate acts on each other. She knew what his cock felt and tasted like. It was no different for Mulder. He could look at her and draw from memory what her desire looked like from her face to her nether regions that he licked until she came while screaming into a pillow. She wasn’t sure what was worse, knowing herself or knowing that he also knew.

If they had just gone to sleep after they were rescued, maybe the last year would have been different. Of course, they made the wrong choice and now faced a different set of problems.

Tonight, they would have to face the consequence of those actions. She felt it bubbling up between them. The only problem was she wasn’t sure if the feelings between them were entirely emotions of affection and friendship. At times, she felt like they both wanted to strangle each other. The air of this evening was a strange mix of both.


	2. The Hotel Room

Mulder tucked both room keys in his jacket pocket and left Scully to take her own bag as he walked off towards their room. She followed him out of the crowded lobby, up the set of stairs to the top floor while he took longer than normal strides. She barely kept up to him as he walked along the veranda over the parking lot.

That small gesture annoyed her a little, but she tried to ignore it. He couldn’t get away from her once they were inside the room.

The outdoor pool in the courtyard was open to the rain, and the kelly green umbrellas standing in the glass tables were soaked through from the weather the state of Florida had suffered the past three days.

As she reached the door where Mulder was working his electronic key in the mechanism, she looked across the courtyard as more and more of the passengers displaced there were finding their own accommodations.

The rain continued to drizzle down off the red tiled roof and onto the cement below. The hotel turned on the ‘No Vacancy’ sign, and she sighed as he opened their door.

“King-sized beds in hotels like this has to be a new fad,” Mulder noted as he set his damp bag on the chair by the door.

The room was a lot like most of the hotels they had stayed at in the past. It was spacious but not enough room for a cot or makeshift bed on the floor. There wasn’t even a couch that she could offer to use so that they didn’t have to be so close.

“Most of the places we’ve stayed at offered one queen or two twin beds,” she agreed as the door shut behind her.

“I really want to have a shower and change into dry clothes,” Mulder stated as he took in the space and kicked off his shoes in the closet across from the bathroom. “Can you wait ten minutes?”

Scully nodded as she set her bag on the chair opposite Mulder’s. She wanted to hang everything up inside to ensure that her clothes would be dry the next morning, but food came first.

She removed her shoes as well and set them next to his. Their waterlogged jackets dripped down onto the carpet and Scully grabbed a towel from the bathroom before Mulder took it over completely.

“I was going to call out for delivery. I thought there might be a pizza place in that stack of menus,” she replied as she protected the dark brown carpet from further damage.

“Yeah, I’m kind of over Chinese,” he agreed as he fished out his toiletry kit from his bag. “If we can’t get pizza, Chinese is fine…”

Deciding what to eat could be a battle for them because she usually tried to find something that wouldn’t take too long to order and had something healthy on it she could order as a side.

“Sure,” she nodded again and found a stack of take-out menus from the dresser.

As the shower turned on, Scully glanced up from the first menu to see Mulder stripping in the bathroom. A glimpse of his backside and a brief view of his abdomen down to his-

She turned away and tried to undo the last two seconds of what she just saw.

The man couldn’t close a door to save his life.

She really hoped that he didn’t do that on purpose. It would be a lot easier to get through this night if she hadn’t just seen his half-swollen member, his transverse muscles and bare chest.

Scully sat on the edge of the bed with the room phone on her lap and cleared her throat loudly. Mulder groaned as the water hit his back, and she tried not to connect that sound to ones he had made while she had him in her mouth.

Why was she so intent on thinking about this right now?

“Hello, Mellow Mushroom Pizzaria, what can I get for you?” a voice answered.

“Hi, can you deliver to La Quinta on North Monroe?” Scully asked as she stood up from the bed and attempted to move around the room.

“Sure can,” the young man affirmed as she walked back to the menu where she had tossed it on the dresser. “What’ll it be?”

Scully thumbed the menu and looked at sizes and sides. “I’ll get one large pepperoni, a Greek salad with no olives and…”

“Get beer!” Mulder called from the bathroom.

As if they really needed more to lower their judgement at the moment, but her nerves were running on high that it might help her relax a little. As long as she didn’t relax too much.

“Do you have shiner bock?” she asked the young man as she reached her bag for her clothes.

“Six or twelve-pack?”

“Six,” she requested. She held the phone away from her mouth and turned back to Mulder inside the bathroom. “Anything else?”

“Salad?”

“I got Greek,” she called back.

“We have a pretty good chocolate brownie,” the young man offered.

“I’ll get one of those, too,” she added. “We’re staying in room 207 at the La Quinta.”

“Your order will be ready in 27 minutes. You can expect your driver to arrive fifteen minutes after that,” he reported. “Name?”

Scully glanced back towards the bathroom where Mulder was whistling happily. “Fox.”

“Fox?”

“F-o-x,” she spelled happily as she hung her sweater, jeans and t-shirts. “We’ll be paying cash.”

“No problem,” he assured and hung up the phone.

Her pyjama pants were a little damp from the rain so she hung them in the closet next to their jackets. She made a mental note not to forget them. Next, she decided to offer an olive branch to Mulder and hang up his clothes for tomorrow too. Once their things were spread out in the closet, she put her hands on her hips and nodded once as though it finished the act.

She glanced around the room and decided that the sooner she was out of her clothes the better, but undressing while Mulder could be finishing his shower at any moment was akin to a game of chicken.

The bathroom door swung open, and Mulder exited in a towel with the bandage still clinging to his neck.

“You have _zero_ boundaries,” she admonished him as she tried to push down the tingling feelings of seeing him in such a state of undress.

He looked down at his towel and back to her innocently. “I left my underwear in my bag.”

Scully took out her shirt, underwear and toiletries bag. “Can I get in there?”

Mulder nodded. “Sure. I can change out here.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

“Where are my things for tomorrow?” he asked with a huff of air.

She pointed to the closet where the slow drip of damp clothing hit the towel, and he nodded.

“Thanks,” he sighed, and she turned around as he reached for the edge of his towel.

As she pushed the door closed, she turned the shower back on and quickly shed her clothing. Rolling her underwear from that day into her socks, Scully pulled the curtain on the tub back and looked down the drain.

“No surprises, okay?” she whispered as she set her shampoo, conditioner and razor on the edge.

The hot water felt nice, and she lathered her body quickly to remove the hurricane from her skin. She took a washcloth off the rack over the toilet and lathered it up to wash her body the second time. As she ran her hand up her calf, she took a razor in hand and removed the small hairs that had grown in the last two days on her legs.

She did a quick pass on her other leg and underarms before taking the washcloth across her skin again to really get the smell of the day off of her.

As she exited the shower, Scully pushed the curtain back on the bathtub and took one last glance down the drain. Scully could hear the television on in the bedroom, and she decided to take her time getting lathered up with lotion and drying her hair.

Truth be told, she wasn’t sure why she was going out of her way to make sure she was ‘bed-ready’ for Mulder. Or maybe she was just going through the motions to stall being in the same room as him in her pyjamas.

For all the times that he had stayed in her room later than what could be considered normal, she had rarely been in a state of undress around him. As she was about to start brushing her teeth, she glanced over to the bathroom door to ensure it was still closed.

Donning her panties and nightshirt, that happened to be a worn out grey tank top from her days on the UMD track team, she wondered if the absence of a bra would warrant a comment from Mulder. Usually on the road, she packed a matching set that covered everything to prevent a late night bedroom intrusion from Mulder when he suddenly had a brilliant idea to break in somewhere that was clearly off limits. This time, she had to pack in such a rush before they left that she couldn't ensure she had laundered all of her matching pyjamas.

She then realized that she left her pink pyjama pants hanging in the closet across from the bathroom and was now faced with using the soaking wet towel from her shower to cover herself or to go without pants and hope Mulder was too entranced in the news to notice her.

Scully cracked the door open and poked her head through to see if he was paying attention to her actions.

He had his boxer shorts on, a pile of shells growing on a napkin on the bedside table and his other hand on the remote. She really hated that he looked more chiselled than ever or that his biceps flexed randomly as he sat there.

Did he do sit-ups and push-ups while she was in the bathroom? How did he look so good?

Shaking her head to pull her out of the wanderings of a woman who had no business oggling her partner, she decided to go for it.

As she took two steps back towards the bathroom with her pink cotton pants in hand, Mulder whistled at her.

“Lace?” he asked with approval. “I like.”

Scully turned towards him and put her hands on her hips disapprovingly. The shirt came down just before the apex of her thighs, but he had already seen them. He had actually seen it all, in different ways and tasted it too.

Still, she wanted some dignity.

“Eyes to your own business, Agent Mulder,” she ordered sternly.

She wasn’t sure why she expected that to work. The man was habitually petulant and went against what was expected of him in every regard. They had already slept together, but for some reason she felt like she needed to keep things professional.

Mulder put the remote on the bedside table and tossed another shell onto the pile. He grinned at her challengingly and started to walk towards her.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

What was she doing? Why wasn’t she moving back to the bathroom? Why didn’t she put her pants on?

“I like this shirt,” he noted with a grin, and she couldn’t tell how much of his actions were joking. “I just want to see if it’s as soft as it looks.”

“Mulder,” she admonished and maneuvered her pants to start to put them on.

“Ah, you’re ruining the fantasy,” he scolded and turned away to sit on the edge of the bed.

Scully’s cheeks were hot and anger bubbled up inside of her. “Are you serious?”

Mulder glanced over to her, her chest specifically, and then back to the television. “Don’t parade around pantsless if you don’t mean it.”

What? She wasn’t parading. He was the one who was walking around half-swollen in a towel.

“What the hell does that mean?” she asked.

“You’re being more than just a little flirtatious,” he commented obviously, and her jaw dropped. “It’s even more than you usually do. The chicken wing out of my fingers? Constantly stepping into me while we’re waiting for the bus? And I mean… okay, sleeping on me, usual stuff for us when we’re waiting somewhere but rubbing my thigh and shit while you’re sleeping?”

“I was sleeping," she tried to justify. “I didn’t know I was doing that. I can assure you I didn’t _intend_ -”

“Of course you don’t!” he cried as he threw his hands up in the air. Mulder stood up and turned to face her with his hands on his hips. “You don’t mean anything, do you?

Scully held her hands up defensively. “Wait a _damned_ minute-”

“No, _you_ wait a damned minute-”

“Hey!” she cut him off. “I’m not the one who has been touching you right above your ass, declaring my love for you and manhandling you for the last six years!”

“Are you seriously saying that to me after all the ‘medical doctoring’ you do when you check me over for head trauma?” he challenged.

Their voices were raised, but she didn’t care. It wasn’t the middle of the night in Tallahassee. It was four fifty-six p.m. and as the sun came out over their motel, the sound of guests running towards the pool echoed up to their window.

“I’m checking you for bumps or abrasions,” she corrected him. “You shouldn’t ask people to be your medical doctor if you don’t want them to touch you.”

“Oh god, justifying shit that’s actually other shit,” he shook his head. “You’re innocent, and I’m just some perve that walked in on you naked.”

“Mulder, I told you I didn’t care about that-”

“Well, I care!” he cried, throwing his hands up in the air again. “It makes shit a lot more difficult when I catch a glimpse of you like that.”

Things were spiralling out of control again. They had never had a fight like this in six years. All their shit was getting thrown onto the table.

She steadied her shoulders and glared at him. “Why the hell don’t you shut the fucking door before flashing someone then?”

Mulder narrowed his eyes at her and smirked. “Like the show?”

She smirked back. “Nothing I haven’t seen before.”

He groaned loudly and walked away from her before coming back. He clenched and unclenched his fists before shaking his flattened palms in frustration. “You really are a piece of work, you know.”

“ _Me_?”

“Yeah,” he shook his head. “I tell you how I feel while we’re in the middle of trying to save the world, you get abducted again, I get shot in the head but still manage to save your scrawny ass from Antarctica, you climb on top of me in a snowcat and do that shit with your pelvis, run away from me at Casey Station then ignore it when I say I love you and act like I treated you like some fucking consolation prize!”

He could fuck off with all of that shit he just said.

“Oh, fuck off,” she scoffed.

“Fuck off?” he repeated in disbelief. “ _Fuck off_?”

“Yeah,” she snapped back. “Fuck off with that nonsense. You do treat me like some consolation prize. You spend the last six fucking years telling me not to trust a soul, but you put all your faith and life into the hands of a woman that is most definitely working with CGB Spender, the man who was part of my abduction-”

“And your cure,” he cut her off.

The gloves were off now.

“Fuck that!” she cried. “That’s bullshit. He was only saving me so he could track me with that stupid chip, and the only reason I’m not taking it out is so I don’t get cancer and almost die. _Ag_ _ain_!”

“I know you almost died!” he yelled back. “I was the one in your hospital room sleeping on uncomfortable chairs and bringing you all the weird ass food you would only eat during chemo!”

“I said thank you-”

“I just reminded you that I said I love you again, and you’re ignoring me. You should be the one to fuck off,” he emphasized as he walked towards the table near their door.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m getting my wallet out for when dinner arrives! I assume you have no cash on you!” he yelled with the same anger he had just spouted towards her regarding everything else. “Your skepticism saved me, but you make me fucking crazy. People think I’m nuts to believe in the aliens that do exist, but you make me absolutely bonkers the way that you’ll see a monster chase after you and still deny its existence!”

“I told you its DNA was similar to ours,” she reminded him haughtily with her hands on her hips. “I don’t deny what you saw. You just don’t pay attention!”

Mulder’s eyes went wide, and he shook his head. “Pay attention? I pay attention to everything. I know that you don’t like carnations because you think they’re ridiculously fragrant. I know you liked to eat bee pollen and yogurt fruit cups once a week, every month. As I’m saying this, I realized you do that around your period. I know that you take three breath mints from every bowl at every restaurant that offers them and save two in your purse for when we’re travelling. You must have a goddamned stockpile at your apartment by now.”

“Great, you observed me,” she replied calmly. “Congratu- _fucking_ -lations. You figured out my period!”

“That’s not the point,” he muttered.

Scully took a deep breath. “I’m talking about the science you told me is wrong. Science can’t be wrong Mulder, that’s why it’s the baseline for which we use to classify all things.”

“You’re really something else,” he said with a shake of his head and started to walk towards her. Instinctively, Scully backed away, and she found herself getting closer to the wall near the television. “You are the one who said you couldn’t do anything with me romantically after we had sex not once, but twice in the span of one day. You do that shit with your mouth and let me taste you, but then you push me away and treat me like a mistake-”

“You’re not over Diana,” she cut him off evenly as her back hit the wall.

“What?” he shook his head. “Diana? Of course I am.”

“You’re not,” she emphasized.

“Bullshit I’m not,” he denied.

She rolled her eyes and clenched her jaw. “You’re _not_.”

“And somehow you knew that when you fucked me in a snowcat?” he challenged. "Or the next time when we were back at Casey Station?"

“No, I knew that when you two held hands inside a hospital outside Gibson’s room,” she replied. “I just didn’t want to admit it to myself in Antarctica.”

“What?” he asked with a shake of his head. “Were you spying on me?”

“It’s not spying if it’s something you’re not ashamed about,” she replied back sharply. “I bet you were thinking of her when Gibson said you were thinking about one of the girls you arrived with.”

“I wasn’t,” he denied, and she rolled her eyes. “I wasn’t. I was thinking about the drive over. You put your lipstick on-”

“Lies,” she cut him off. “Why are you lying?”

“I’m not lying about anything!” he practically yelled. “God, you are _impossible_! I had _zero_ regrets about the sex we had in Antarctica, but I could tell you regretted it before we even finished. You ran away.”

“You didn’t seem concerned with walking after me,” she quipped. “You left me in the bathroom to clean up by myself and ignored me until we were back in the United States.”

“What was I supposed to do when you left me with a wet spot and that look on your face?” he retorted.

“Run off with your ex to survive the coming apocalypse, apparently,” she jibed back as she crossed her arms under her breasts.

“We were coming to get you,” he pointed out as he put his hands on either side of her head and leaned towards her. “I’m over Diana. I only went with her because I wanted us to survive. You and me. You were right about the hanger, I'll give you that. I will say that you seem to have zero interest getting back on the X-Files while she’s down there protecting the unit and ensuring it stays open.”

“More bullshit,” she muttered. "After Spender was shot, she took off. That office has been empty for the last week and a half."

Mulder rolled his eyes. "You tried to quit too. Don't act like you're above trying to leave."

“I’ve done nothing but try to help you the past six years, and you’re throwing that at me?” she sputtered. “What was risking my job and my career to chase down white tanker trucks across the country? That had zero to do with our assignment under Michaud.”

His face inched closer, and he said quietly but sternly, “I can’t believe I have to quantify how I feel for someone I’ve gone to the ends of the earth for, but I shouldn’t be surprised when talking to the most _stubborn_ woman on the fucking _planet_.”

Scully pushed on his chest, and he grabbed her wrists. She struggled, tried to push him again, and he chuckled. She hated that smug laugh.

“You’re being a bastard,” she muttered as she continued with a clenched jaw. “You don’t think you’re treating me like a consolation prize, but you are. You think it’s fine to touch, flirt and invade my space when there’s someone else you want to be with, but you do. I should have known that of all the things you’d believe, it would be in anything but me.”

“ _Believe_ in you?” he repeated in disbelief. “What the hell have I been asking you to come on all this crap with me for if I didn’t?”

“Because your ex isn’t available?” she muttered.

“You need to stop,” he told her.

“Why?” she challenged. “At least one of us is telling the _truth_.”

He turned his face away from her and then focused back on her with more intensity that she had seen in years. “I’m telling you the truth, but why should that surprise me that you don’t seem to get it? I’m talking to the _queen_ of skeptics!”

“Oh because I want to see more than a crappy photo, a light in the sky or read the manifesto of a man who believes he was abducted by aliens?” she asked referring to Roky Crikenson.

That whole case was a mess from the men in black that looked like Alex Trebec to the kids in the story changing their theories from sex to abduction to who the hell knows what.

“Let go of me,” she whispered, and his grip loosened a little on her wrists. 

“You can’t go on a hunch just _once_ in your life?” he asked with exasperation, he pulled his hands back to release her wrists. She rubbed her fingers along her right arm and glared at him. “Go with your instinct? Use your gut or intuition to follow a lead?”

“I’m sorry, we must have attended different classes at the FBI where they told us to use evidence and facts, but told you to read tea leaves and tarot cards,” she quipped with heavily laden sarcasm as she tried to break her arms free.

”How many times has it led us to being right because we used a theory I developed over your science,” he said with a roll of his eyes as he dropped her arms.

“You act like I’m the only person on the planet that believes in science,” Scully admonished him as she tried to move from the space between the wall and his body. “Science isn’t some fad religion, Mulder. It’s the basis of all facts.”

Mulder stood up a little and inched closer so that she was forced to look up at him, closing off the gap that she could have escaped from. “You said you believed in me and what I saw. Are you wavering on that because you’re jealous over what you think I feel for Diana?”

“You’ve been playing emotional hopscotch between the two of us since she arrived on the case where we first met Gibson,” she reminded him with a steady voice as she met his gaze. “Sleeping with me didn’t change that for you, but you’re expecting me to be okay with it anyway.”

Mulder stepped even closer to her, and she felt the heat of his body radiating off his chest. Her nipples hardened, but she kept her face stern.

“What are you doing?” she asked angrily.

“I’m proving a point,” he began and stood so that there was a mere inch between them.

“What point is that?” she asked as she put her hands on his abdomen below his pecs. His face inched down to hers, and she felt a brush of something against her abdomen. One glance down and she realized it was Mulder’s impressive desire tenting in his boxer shorts, and she scoffed. “You _can’t_ be serious-”

His mouth captured hers in a passionate kiss, cutting off her argument and pausing the fight between them. In the past, she had never been one to fight and make up with sex in the middle of things. She couldn’t connect the passions of her sex to the anger of betrayal she felt when an ex-boyfriend ultimately let her down. It wasn’t her style. Sex belonged with affection and anger belonged with disappointment. The two did not make bedfellows she wanted to be with.

Her hands pushed on his chest while his hands gripped her ass to pull her up to his level. She had to fight every urge to wrap her legs around his waist, but they went there the moment his cock rubbed against her centre.

He was kissing her like his life depended on it. He was massaging her tongue, holding her close and pushing himself into her like the end of the world was right around the corner, and he needed to do at least one thing right. Mulder held her against the wall with his body weight and one hand left her ass to palm her breast over the top of her shirt.

Scully broke the kiss as she moaned, and his mouth went instinctively to her neck. His teeth nipped, and his lips took sections of her skin to mark and taste her. She would be left with a long line of abrasions that could only be rationalized as a love bite. She couldn’t call it anything else and would be forced to wear a collared shirt to the office for the next week.

The bastard.

Her eyes rolled back in her head as she relished the sensations of Mulder putting his oral fixations to use.

Mulder pumped his hips against hers and captured her mouth again to continue the kiss. Her mind was screaming at her to get down, finish the fight and walk back to D.C. rather than spend another minute with him. They hadn’t resolved any underlying problems. If anything, they just yelled all their past, repressed issues that they never dealt with in the course of their work history.

Scully’s legs tightened around his waist, and her pelvis rotated against his cock.

“Fuck,” he muttered against her mouth and held her ass in his hands as he walked them towards the bed.

Oh, shit.

They fell to the pillow top mattress, and Mulder pushed himself on his arms to study her. Her body felt hot, her face was flushed and her chest was heaving after a marathon of kissing.

Of course, with all the anger and excitement between them, the night would start off like this. Nothing in her past with previous lovers was even close to how she was with Mulder. She used to feel like he brought out her true self, that she felt the most challenged while they worked together and he respected her for her mind instead of being reduced by her gender.

Right now, she felt wanton and heavy. She needed to feel him inside of her. She wanted his mouth on her, and his hands touching her everywhere.

Mulder’s fingers hooked into the waistband of her pyjama pants, and her eyes widened at the realization. Maybe he was clairvoyant, or maybe he had been thinking about her as much as she had been fantasizing about him.

Just as he was about to pull her pants and underwear down, there was a knock on their room door.

“Mellow Mushroom Pizzaria!” the voice called.

Mulder pushed his face into her abdomen, and groaned. “You gotta be fucking _joking_.”

The door knocked again. “Delivery!”

Scully pushed on his forehead, and Mulder stood up quickly.

“Just a second!” Scully called and moved to her bag to pull out a long sleeved V-neck sweater to cover up.

Mulder turned to his bag and pulled a pair of jeans out of the bottom. He tucked himself inside and opened the door without a shirt.

“Delivery for Fox?” the young man asked holding a hot bag and a plastic one for their salad.

Mulder looked over his shoulder to Scully, and she couldn’t tell if she was blushing from the jibe at his name or the sex they almost had.

“Yeah, that’s me,” he admitted.

“Forty-six oh seven,” the young man told Mulder.

Scully came up next to him to take the food while Mulder fished out a fifty from his wallet. She came up behind him and handed a ten to the young man. Mulder gave her a look she was trying hard not to notice.

She walked to the desk to get the flimsy napkins provided with the coffee machine and joined Mulder at the table where he was setting up their feast.

Apparently, whatever point he was trying to make earlier had been made, and all she felt now as her hormones cooled and the anger dissipated from the room was humiliation that she had allowed herself to get so carried away.

Shit.

“Are you coming?” he asked lightly as he sat down and opened the box of the large pepperoni. “Ah, Scully.”

She was _almost_ going to come from grinding and kissing Mulder a mere five minutes ago. Apparently, all that nonsense was over, and they were going to sweep it under the rug like they had their escapade at Casey Station. It wasn’t easy to go from hot to cold in such a short span of time.

Setting the napkins on the table, she found her pocket knife in the front of her carry on bag and opened each of them a beer.

They used the box as a giant plate, and she set her beer on the window sill. Silence befell the room, and she began questioning the last forty-five minutes of her life with serious concern.

Fuck.


	3. The Bar

Mulder downed his second beer with a slice of pizza in hand while the news played in the background to fill the silence between them. Scully sat across from him as she picked out the olives from the Greek salad and placed them on the lid of the container.

“We only got a six-pack of beer,” she reminded him. “And it’s just after five.”

“I called while you were in the shower and changed it to twelve,” he replied and picked up the second six-pack that was sitting under his chair. He set it down and abandoned his pizza to crack another one from the pack on the table. “Drink up, Scully. It’s going to be a _long_ trip back home.”

It was a painfully truthful statement that made her sigh. She took a sip of her chilled bottle. She watched the condensation hit the tabletop and form a distinctive ring around the edges of the brown bottle. She picked up a napkin, folded it into a makeshift coaster and then eyed Mulder’s third ring forming on the table.

This wasn’t her house, and she wasn’t his mother so scolding him about such a thing would only be considered nagging. Scully cleared her throat and went back to picking out the olives among the bell peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers and onions.

“ _Why_ don’t you like olives?” he asked with an emphasis on the why as though Scully and the misclassified fruit had a falling out he wasn’t aware of.

“The smell of the brine is off-putting,” she said with a shrug of one shoulder. “Even covered in olive oil, vinegar, oregano and garlic, I can still smell the brine.”

Mulder nodded, and the silence returned.

Neither had mentioned the almost sex they just had when the delivery guy showed up with their pizza. Mulder had yet to put a shirt on. Instead, he was still half-swollen in his jeans and refusing to hide it.

Scully kept her sweatshirt on and scowled at the way he leaned back in his chair just enough that his abs flexed as he finished his fourth slice of pepperoni. Metabolisms of men of all ages were unfair to the women who had to actually exercise and eat right to stay trim.

“I have a question for you,” she started as she felt satisfied that their salad was rid of the offending item.

“I know that olives are a fruit,” he answered before she could finish her thought and cracked another beer for her that she didn’t want. “And no, I don’t think it’s weird that oil and vinegar as a dressing are mixed fruit juice.”

“Vinegar is fermented,” she pointed out as she popped some cucumber and red pepper into her mouth.

“But sort of a juice, no?” he replied as he spoke through a cheek full of pizza and waved his slice around. “Then what?”

“What happened between you and Diana?” she asked. “I know you went to her apartment that night.”

“How did you know-”

“You just looked…” her voice trailed off. “I had a feeling. Call it women’s intuition.”

While her heightened sexual arousal had dissipated, her body was still twitching from the previous anticipation of what could have happened. Before she could go any further, she needed some kind of closure. They had started down a path to help Cassandra, but all it did was open a new can of worms they weren’t prepared to deal with.

Mulder took another large bite of his pizza and then pulled the salad towards him. He breathed out heavily through his nose as he finished the bite and looked at her with that same look he gave her that night when she picked him up to investigate possible aliens at a train yard. Their life was weird.

“You said she couldn’t be trusted,” he reminded her. “I had to find proof to dissuade my natural feelings that she was being honest with me.”

“I’m still not convinced she _is_ worthy of your faith in her,” she retorted. “You told me yourself that Marita’s presence at Fort Marlene was suspect and _yet_ you doubt nothing about why Diana would be there also.”

He rolled his eyes and shifted in his chair like a juvenile delinquent. “I didn’t find anything in her apartment to indicate she was working with Spender.”

“Except for Spender's presence, and she wanted you to join them in that hanger,” she countered. “Anyone who is aligned with the Syndicate can’t be someone who wants the best for the future. First she’s taking over the X-Files with Spender’s son, then she’s working with the CDC and takes us to Fort Marlene… How does a woman working in the basement of the J. Edgar Hoover building have those kinds of contacts?”

Mulder sat up straight. “That’s a fair point, but is it possible that you have other feelings about her because of what she represents? To me?”

“Get over yourself,” she muttered as she sat back in her chair, folding her arms under her breasts. “I tried to give you proof with the Lone Gunmen, and you just ignored every fact and piece of information I gave you. You ask me for facts and science but ignore everything I gave you. You’re so willing to believe in everything, but you won’t believe she could possibly betray humanity and work with the Syndicate. I risked my career for you multiple times, but I have to go with every gut instinct you have. Why is that? Why can’t you trust me when I’m telling you that the cards don’t line up? Mulder, is it possible that if she was anyone else, you would have maybe trusted what I was saying versus throwing it aside? Can you ask yourself that?”

“She kissed me in her apartment,” he confessed as he leaned closer to her, and Scully arched an eyebrow. There was a beat of silence because she didn’t know what to say to that. “I didn’t tell you about it at the time because I thought it might send you over the edge.”

She ran her tongue along her teeth and then over her bottom lip as she took in that statement.

“Why? At the time, we didn’t have anything going on,” she countered, trying to play devil’s advocate.

“I thought after… I wanted something to…” Mulder’s voice trailed off, and he was suddenly at a loss for words. He shrugged. “You’re important to me. I didn’t want you to feel like I had betrayed you…. I didn’t like how that felt when I was in your shoes.”

“When?” she questioned.

“Ed Jerse, Philadelphia in a cold November of 1997,” he stated, and she furrowed her brow. “You and he together… It made me feel sick and jealous. I didn’t want to do that to you.”

“Mulder,” she admonished him.

That was entirely unfair. If he was feeling jealous or territorial then, it was unfounded. They were hardly at a place she would classify as romantic. There was a lingering hug in a Senate subcommittee hearing, but that definitely wasn’t the time for romance.

“It did,” he insisted and took a swig of his beer. “I wasn’t allowed to think of you as mine but I-”

“You shouldn’t think of me that way-” she started, and Mulder furrowed his brow. “I can’t trust that feeling you have, Mulder.”

“Why not? I’m here, aren’t I?” he challenged. “I came to you instead of waiting with Diana-”

“If you had to choose right now,” she cut him off, and he pursed his lips. “Between Diana or me, who would you choose?”

Mulder opened his mouth to reply but not a sound came out.

That was all the answer she needed to every question she would have about their future going forward.

She stood up and marched over to the closet to grab a pair of pants and socks. She went to the bathroom to put them on, foregoing her bra and slipping her shoes on as she shook with anger.

“Where are you going?” Mulder asked in confusion as he stood up.

She half expected him to stand in front of the door to block her way, but to her surprise and disappointment, he let her pass.

“I need some air,” she told him tersely as she pulled the door open. “Do me a favour and _don’t_ follow me. You’re good at that.”

She heard him start to argue as the door shut behind him, but she didn’t want to hear it.

He said some pretty big things in there. Feeling territorial over her in a year when she felt like they were finally finding their footing in their work shook her a bit. Did he want her then or was he at a place where he didn’t want anyone else to have her? What was that about? And what the hell did that mean, ‘send her over the edge?’ What sends her over the edge was information being kept from her or being lied to.

Her feet took her to the stairs and down towards the lobby. The sound of the guests at the hotel enjoying a small thing like a sunny afternoon at a pool was just a buzzing noise in the background. She didn’t want to be around happy people.

At some point as she walked, she realized she had been talking to herself, and she took a steadying breath.

When she reached the portico, she looked in each direction for somewhere to hide. If she stayed away long enough and was lucky, Mulder might be asleep when she returned.

There was a bright neon sign in the distance, so she decided to head towards it. It was a fourteen-minute walk to Pockets Pool and Pub where the air smelled of spilled beer, body odour and fried food. It was loud with arcade games blaring in the background. A row of dartboards lined the wall, and she looked past all the noise to the bar off the bowling alley.

 _Fucking Florida_.

Scully made her way across the pub and up to a bar stool that was surprisingly easy to climb into.

“Hey there,” the bartender drawled with a toothpick in the side of his mouth and a Grease Lightning vibe that was surprisingly not unattractive. “What can I get you?”

“I’d like a bottle of water and a shot of your top shelf tequila,” she requested.

She really should be sticking to one kind of liquor, but Shiner Bock had only 3.46 per cent of alcohol in it. She probably burned off the alcohol from storming out of their hotel room.

The bartender handed her one bottle of Evian. She cracked the bottle and downed half the contents. He put a tumbler in front of her and poured the clear Don Julio in as the fast pour spout let out small hiccups of noise while the air filled the vacant space.

“Gracias,” she thanked as the bartender put a lime on the edge.

She wasn’t expecting a margarita on the rocks at a place like this, but she didn’t care about the form the alcohol came in. She was on the edge, but this time it wasn’t in a panic to find Mulder.

She glanced into the cash in her wallet and counted a few bills for a cab. She put a ten on the bar, and the bartender waved his hand.

“Nah,” he said. “You look like you just flew in from the hurricanes. That one’s on me.”

“I _was_ displaced here because of the hurricanes,” she affirmed with a bit of shock. Maybe she looked terrible, as though she had stood in the eye of it and somehow survived. “How did you know?”

“You’ve got an American Airlines sticker on your jeans,” he confessed. “I saw it as you were walking in.”

Scully looked down to the pair she had pulled from her bag. The two uppercase A’s with wings in between was hanging on to her right thigh. That must have come off her bag. “You saw that from over there?”

“Bartenders are more observant than the CIA,” he said with a bit of knowing. “We see _everything_.”

“Or did you make an assumption about me?” she queried and took another swig of water.

She studied his face and looked down to his shirt for a name tag, but in the absence of finding one, she guessed she would have to ask if she planned to spend the evening warming one of their stools.

“We have filtered water, you know,” the bartender informed her as she finished off the water.

She shook her head. “If you saw what I just saw, you’d switch to bottled water too.”

“Want to tell me about it?” he asked as a ticket printed up near him. He glanced at it and began making two highballs. He set them on a round tray at the end of the bar with the ticket and walked back towards Scully. “What’s your name, anyway? I can’t get away with calling women ‘Red’ or ‘Gorgeous’ anymore.”

“Would you like to be called something related to your likeness?” she countered with a grin as she moved the glass between her hands.

He put a new bottle in front of her and poured two shots. The glasses were finished with a lime garnish and he held one up to her.

“I’m Dana,” she introduced as she picked up her tumbler.

The bartender clinked his against hers. “Nice to meet you, Dana. I’m Rick.”

Rick was not entirely horrible to look at. His physique mirrored Mulder’s but from where Scully was sitting, Mulder probably had an inch or two on him. He was attractive with dark blue eyes and sandy blonde hair. He had a slick white T-shirt on and an apron around his narrow waist with the logo on it.

He set his glass down and held out his hand. Scully took it, and they shook slowly. There was a beat where she thought the whole greeting was going on too long, but it was abruptly interrupted by Mulder sitting on the stool next to her.

“What are we having?” he asked as he shed his jacket.

Rick dropped her hand and gave Mulder a look that was all confidence and bravado. It probably made her partner more than a little annoyed, but at this point, Scully didn’t care.

“What can I get for you, man?” Rick asked as he picked up another ticket to pour a jug of beer. "Dana and I were sharing a couple of shots of Don Julio."

Mulder pursed his lips and sat back in his chair. He spread one arm across the back of Scully’s stool that she felt was territorial and gave her arm a squeeze.

“I’ll just have a bottle of water and a shot of Maker’s Mark,” Mulder ordered and glanced over to Scully with a confident smile. “How’s it going?”

“How did you find me?” she questioned.

“There are two pubs nearby,” he informed her, and she raised an eyebrow. “I called the first one and asked the bartender if a ridiculously beautiful redhead was in there. They put me on the phone with someone named Traci who sounded like she had smoked since age six and did not want to talk to me of all people.”

“So you took your chances and walked over here?” she guessed, and he nodded proudly. Scully shook her head, and he gave her an offended look. “What?”

“I’m trying to be nice,” he said obviously.

She sighed and put her hands on the edge of the bar to stand up. “I need to wash my hands.”

Mulder caught her wrist as came she around her stool and gave her a woeful look. “I want to talk.”

“You said enough at the hotel room,” she snapped and tried to pull her hand free. “Mulder-”

“Can you hear me out?” he pleaded tersely, and she breathed through her nose quietly. “I’m trying to explain myself.”

She pursed her lips and nodded. “Just give me a second.”

He let go of her wrist, and she tried not to think about the fact that Mulder might be asking the bartender a hundred questions about what she said before he got there.

Scully walked down the short hallway to the ladies bathroom. As she was washing her hands, there was a knock on the door. She ignored it and ran her fingers through her hair. After another persistent knock, she turned her head to the door.

“The door’s unlocked,” she called.

Mulder pushed the swinging door open and held it with his foot. “Anyone else in here?”

Scully looked around the empty bathroom. Stark white tiles adorned the space with red checkered tiles on the walls and floor. The room had matching red doors on the three stalls with white harsh lighting above that seemed too bright for the decor of the pub. Maybe it was the buzzing in her head from a long day of mixed states of intoxication.

“No, but that doesn’t mean you should come in.”

He gave her a pained look. “Can we talk?”

“You said enough earlier,” she repeated. “Can we just bury it like we did the shit in Antarctica? When we get back to D.C., we can ask to have a week off and spend some time away from each other.”

“ _No_ ,” Mulder replied with a shake of his head. “I can’t keep burying everything down like nothing matters. Stuff happened between us. It’s going to keep happening between us until we resolve a few things.”

She sighed but didn’t want to admit that he was right. Admittedly, she was being stubborn, but she was tired of this game of chicken they were playing.

“I don’t want to keep fighting-” she began.

“Neither do I,” he agreed softly as he walked inside the room. He put his back to the door with folded arms and gave her an expectant look. “I’m sorry I didn’t answer you in the hotel room.”

Scully pulled two sheets of paper towel from the dispenser and dried her hands. “It’s fine.”

“It’s _not_ ,” he shook his head as he unfolded his arms and took a couple of steps towards her. “In all honesty, I can’t really say why I didn’t automatically say you. Maybe it felt too honest.”

“I don’t need you to choose me,” she replied with a wave of her hand as she tossed the paper towel in the bin on the wall. “I shouldn’t ask questions that I’m not ready to hear the answers to.”

Mulder gave her a look as he stopped a foot away from her. “I think I wasn’t ready to answer because I thought… you might reject me or…”

“ _Reject_ you?” she repeated as she crossed her arms. “I’ve… I kissed you back. I wasn’t the one behaving like you had wronged me the last eight months. Since we got back to this hemisphere, you’ve done nothing but pull away from me.”

Mulder reached out and unfolded her arms. “Don’t… don’t close yourself off from me.”

His voice was soft in the way that made her want to push her face into his chest. She wasn’t sure why he was so scared of her rejecting him.

“You still haven’t acknowledged my feelings,” he continued slowly. “I don’t think I could take it-”

“I acknowledged it,” she interrupted with a furrowed brow.

Mulder took another step towards her. His voice was low but urgent. “Kissing me back isn’t saying it back. Say it back.”

“Mulder-”

“I love you, Scully,” he repeated with a quiet intensity that mirrored the expressions of desire he had while holding her shivering body in the middle of nowhere. “I love you. _Not_ like a sister. _Not_ like a consolation prize. I’m not saying this because I don’t want to lose you. There’s no one else I want. I’m telling you because it’s how I feel.”

“ _Mulder_ -”

“Say it back,” he whispered as he moved closer. “Say it back or tell me you don’t so I can figure out how long I’ll need to repair my ego.”

“I need-”

“Scully, honestly if you _don’t_ love me-”

“I love you,” she declared quietly.

“What?” His face broke out in a grin, but he tried to mask it. “Did you say it back?”

“Mulder, _shut up_ ,” she jibed, and his grin widened. “I love you, _okay_? I think I knew I loved you at Casey Station, and it scared me…”

He pulled her towards him and looked into her eyes as he tried to read her before he asking the question. “Then why did you walk away at the hospital-”

“I was… embarrassed?” she guessed, thinking about every time he ever said it in the past with drugs in his system or a knock on the head. “I didn’t think you’d _ever_ say it while I was conscious.”

Mulder tilted her chin up and slid his hand into her mess of curls. She could feel what was coming next, and her heart began to beat with anticipation. She wanted him but not there. Maybe it wouldn’t matter entirely in their story that their proclamation of love happened to be in a pub bathroom after surviving a hurricane, a squid monster that thrived on saltwater and an emotional blowout in forced accommodations.

“I’m sorry…” he started and pulled his lower lip between his teeth as he chose his next words. “I’m sorry I was an asshole about Diana. I should have questioned her loyalties and willingness to go to that hanger. I shouldn’t have made excuses for her. I _should_ have been more clear about how I felt about you.”

Scully nodded slightly as she realized her hands were on Mulder’s hips. She moved her right hand up his back, over his soft cotton shirt and felt the muscles underneath flex.

“You mean the _world_ to me,” he whispered as his face grew closer. “I’m a terrible shit about putting that feeling into actions.”

“You… saving me from becoming an alien pod helped a bit,” she confessed as his lips almost reached hers.

“A bit?” he agreed with a smile, and she could feel his breath close in. Her body was tingling with anticipation, and she felt her stomach tighten when the door swung open.

“Y’all can’t do that in here anymore,” a woman in a Pockets Pool and Pub tank top announced with a drawl they had heard too much over the last forty-eight hours. She had on a short apron and tight jeans with holes in the knees. “The health inspector looks for jizz and coke now.”

Mulder gave Scully a wide-eyed sarcastic look and then turned to the waitress. “We’ll go.”

“’Kay,” she said with a snap of her gum and closed the door.

“So close,” he whispered to her and ran a hand through his spiky hair.

Scully pulled her arms back from Mulder and stepped out of his embrace. “C’mon.”

Mulder reached out and took her hand. For all the times that he had held it in times of trouble, it was nice to finally hold it when she felt something other than fear.

“I paid the tab,” he confessed reluctantly as they exited the bathroom, and she arched an eyebrow at him. “I don’t want to be fuzzy if we… I want a clear head, for both of us.”

On that, Scully could agree. “Okay, _that_ was thoughtful. I’ll give you that.”

Mulder’s fingers interlaced with hers was new but welcomed. If she had to guess what was going on in his mind, the bravado he displayed might have been masking some obvious insecurities. Mulder was not a fan of loud and angry arguments.

He told her once on a stakeout that it would have been better if his parents had divorced before Samantha was taken, instead of having yelling matches that he and his sister could hear. For a week after that comment, Scully had wondered if their discourse in the past had upset Mulder until he laughed in the middle of a heated disagreement to inform her that their back and forth had cheered him up.

She might be the ‘enigmatic Dr. Scully,’ but Mulder was a mystery wrapped in a riddle. During their argument before, he was obviously aroused, and a thought flew into her brain that fighting might be some kind of foreplay for him. It was hard to tell when what she knew of Mulder’s sexual appetite was restricted to porn.

“Mulder-” she started as they passed by the bar.

“Thanks, man,” Mulder called to Rick, and he gave them a one motion wave. “What’s up, Scully?”

They reached the entrance of the pub, and Mulder opened the door for her to exit first. The air was damp, and thunder rolled in the distance.

“I… I don’t know how to say this-”

Another boom of thunder echoed around them, and Scully counted for the lightning that came after four Mississippi’s.

“That’s a first,” he jibed and gave her a playful squeeze on her waist. She tried to hide a smile, but it was tough when he was being so charming. “No, seriously. What is it?”

She pressed her lips together, and Mulder’s hand reached up to draw a soft line down her jaw to her chin. She felt flush at his intent attention. “I… I don’t want anger to be part of…”

Scully made an indecipherable hand motion between them.

His brow furrowed and then raised as he slowly came to understand what she was talking about.

“I don’t need… violins and sonnets but… fighting with you isn’t a turn on for me,” she replied slowly. Her cheeks were hot with embarrassment. She looked up in his eyes, and he nodded. “I didn’t think it was for you either, but I really don’t want to argue so that I can justify having sex. Does that make sense?”

“It does,” he assured her. He leaned down to kiss her softly on her lips. When he pulled back, he smiled at her and pulled her into a strong embrace. “Is that something you think I want?”

“It was hard to tell… with what happened earlier-”

“I wasn’t turned on because we were fighting,” he assured her and kissed the top of her head. “I think finally being able to tell you how I feel… clearing the air or whatever we were doing was cathartic. Seeing you without a bra on was… a _conduit_.”

She realized that it was the most open they had been with each other since their stay at Casey Station. Even then, she told him that she couldn’t make any commitments. Every time he pulled away from her after that made a lot more sense when she considered that she was the one who pulled away first.

“I think this was the most open we’ve been since Antarctica,” he noted as he relaxed his embrace with her.

“I was just thinking that,” she noted with a smile.

He looked down at her face, and she could tell there was something he wanted to ask her but didn’t. Instead, he leaned in and gave her a proper kiss with his hands in her hair and his body pressed against hers.

She felt the stucco of the building touch her back and suddenly the kiss was getting out of hand again. Her hands were in his hair, and she felt his desire pressing into her belly. The rain began to pour on the pavement as his tongue slipped into her mouth.

Why was she being so nonchalant about making out in public?

Mulder’s palm flattened across her belly as her nipples hardened, and she realized the state of her exposure. It occurred to her that she wanted to be exposed to him as his hips rocked against hers. The sound of the rain was overtaken by their kissing and moaning.

This was embarrassing and far too open. They needed to get to someplace private, somewhere they could fulfil the actions of desire that were overtaking them.

Scully pulled her mouth away from Mulder’s, and his mouth immediately began to pay attention to the sensitive skin along her neck.

“Mulder,” she whispered as he nipped at the tendon that had caught his attention. “Mulder… we need to get- _oh_!”

Why was he so good at all of this?

“We need to get back to the hotel,” she whispered finally.

Mulder gave her a slight growl as a response and took a slight step back to allow her to catch her breath. “What do you want to do?”

Scully gave him a look that said many things that he seemed to interpret. She wiped her finger along the edge of her mouth. “Call a cab.”

Mulder reached into his pocket for his phone. She watched his eyes search through the door. There was a bulletin board hung adjacent to the entrance, and she realized he must be looking for a cab company's phone number. “Eight five oh, nine nine nine, nine nine nine nine.”

Scully took the phone and dialled the number with unsteady fingers.

She thought her body would be shaking less this time around. Her mind anticipated that she would know what to expect and how to handle the overwhelming feelings that Mulder brought out in her.

“I need a cab to Pockets Pool and Pub,” she asked with a wavering breath. “For Fox Mulder.”

Mulder’s eyes left hers and she wondered if he was observing half-filled parking lot and out to the highway. She felt her body tense as his hand slipped under the hem of her shirt.

The dispatcher promised a two-minute wait, and she hung up. Any spans of time prior to responsibility and accountability was dangerous for them. She needed to leave this place, get into a cab and make it to their hotel room before she could spontaneously combust from anticipation.

Mulder was suddenly an octopus with his hands reaching everywhere and her desire was barely being kept at bay. Just when she thought she couldn’t stand the wait anymore, a white car with a prominent yellow strip down the side pulled up in front of the entrance to the pub.

“ _Fax Moder_?” the driver called as the window rolled down.

“That’s me!” Mulder called over the radio and rain.

The cabbie gave them a nod to get in, and they braved the short span of harsh rain to safety.

“Where to, folks?” he drawled.

“La Quinta up the street,” Scully requested. “Please.”

The driver turned on the meter, and Mulder let his seatbelt be an afterthought. He grabbed Scully’s hips and recaptured her mouth with his. Her back was pressed against the car door, and before she could protest, they were unabashedly making out like teenagers.

Thunder echoed out over the car with lightning trailing behind. Rain fell on the roof of the cab as they abandoned all common sense and reason.


	4. The Bed

Thirty-two dollars later, Scully and Mulder were finally kicked out of the cab and sent on their way. It was uncharacteristic of her to be so brazen about her desires and not care where they were.

She might have felt more embarrassed about their frenzied kisses in the cab, but she was too busy being kissed for all she was worth. She felt lightheaded, her cheeks were hot and she felt her sex tingling with the anticipation of being touched.

They were pulling at each other’s clothing, pressing their bodies tight to one another while their frantic moans filled the room. It was almost too much to handle.

They were past the point of where they could say it was lowered inhibitions or a one-off kiss. Mulder’s hand was gripping her ass so tightly with his thumb along the crease of her pants as he pressed his hardened cock into her pelvis. Mulder knocked over a chair as they maneuvered past the table and to the bed.

She pushed on his chest with shaking hands, and his eyes flashed in pain as his grip on her body released. Scully reached to the hem of her long-sleeved shirt and pulled it over her head. Mulder’s pupil’s dilated as he looked down at her undressing in front of him.

His jacket, their shoes, his shirt, her pants, and the remainder of their outer clothing formed a pile near the door until they were standing in their underwear. Socks had been kicked to the side in the other direction, and she tried to ignore the little voice in her head that told her she could tidy up the clothes in a short beat.

Her bare chest was as fascinating to him as the tenting in his boxer shorts was to her.

She watched his member twitch under her eye, and the memory of taking him in her mouth while he struggled to be quiet flashed back to her.

They didn’t need to be quiet tonight.

Scully hooked her first two fingers into the band of his soft cotton shorts and knelt down as she pulled them to the ground. His feet stepped carefully out of his shorts, and she tossed them towards the chair she had sat on earlier that night. When she looked up to Mulder as she wrapped her hand around his shaft, he groaned loudly.

“You don’t-”

“Mulder, shut _up_ ,” she told him and took his length in her mouth.

He tasted salty and sweet with the familiar scent that she really had only small exposure of since Casey Station. When he stood too close, she could smell his skin under his deodorant, cologne and aftershave she had to will her hormones back into neutral. It was that underlying scent that drove her nuts and made her want to ride him senseless in a snowcat for more than just survival.

“ _Fuuuuuuuuuuck_ ,” he moaned as his trembling hand reached her shoulder.

Scully moved her mouth down his shaft until the smooth head reached the back of her throat then up slowly to release him. When she looked up to his face, he was looking at her in shock.

“Why don’t you sit down?” she offered lightly, and he nodded slowly as he turned ninety degrees to sit on the plush mattress.

Instead of laying back, Mulder watched her with rapt fascination as she held the base of his cock in her hand while she took the head of it into her mouth. Her tongue swirled once around, and he swore slowly. She moved her mouth down again, and his cock twitched as it reached the back of her throat. She hollowed out her cheeks and increased the suction while he said her name like a prayer.

“I… fuck…” he muttered.

“ _Mmm_ ,” she agreed, because what else could she say with a mouthful?

Her head bobbed up and down, pausing at the tip to swirl her tongue and play with the sensitive nerves where he had been circumcised. Mulder’s left hand gripped the bedspread while his right touched the skin at the top of her back. His hands were hot, and she felt him shaking on her tongue.

“You….oh Jesus…. fuck _me_ ,” he stammered.

She could taste the precum on her tongue, and she moved her head to look up at him.

“Goddammit that is sexy as hell,” Mulder shook his head. “Fuck… I don’t wanna….”

Scully bobbed her head twice more before releasing him to the air. She held his twitching shaft in her hand as she licked her lower lip. “Too much?”

He tugged on her upper arms to stand, and he pulled her onto his lap. His cock was pressed between them as he took one nipple into his mouth.

“ _Oh_!” she cried out in surprise.

His mouth released as he whispered against her breast, “The best kind of too much. You… I’m _helpless_ when you do that.”

Scully reached a hand between them, but he caught her wrist before she could touch him.

“I think the best thing to do would be to return the gesture,” he commented and licked the underside of her breast before capturing her nipple again.

Mulder flipped them on the bed and moved down to the ground as he pulled on the back of her knees to reach the edge. His fingers discarded her lace panties quickly, and he tossed them over his shoulder to the pile near the door.

“Oh!” she cried out again as he flipped her body on its side like a rag doll.

He pushed her onto her side, bent one knee up to sit on the bed and her eyes grew wide as his face closed in on her sex.

“What are you-”

Her voice cut off as his tongue swiped along her sex to reach her clit and back again. She was exposed to him in a way she hadn’t been with anyone before. He wasn’t asking her to lie back and open up to him. He had her on her side with his hand gripping her hip tightly and the other holding her pelvis still.

“Oh _god_!” she cried out.

Mulder repeated the action and turned his head sideways so that he could begin to fuck her with his mouth. She heard a pumping sound and realized that he was gripping himself as he licked her the way no one had ever before.

The sound of him touching himself was exciting. He moaned against her flesh, and the hand that had been gripping her hip was suddenly at her sex. He inserted two long fingers inside of her as he flattened his tongue against her clit.

It was sensory overload, and she felt her pussy swelling against his mouth. The sound of her desire coating his fingers was loud in her ears. He moaned and continued to rub himself as she moved closer to her release.

Just when she thought she was close, Mulder stood up and flipped her on her back. He was hard, ready to fuck her and she was painfully swollen. It was possible she had never felt this turned on in her life.

She moved up the bed to the pillows, and Mulder kissed her hips, belly button, the skin on her stomach and up to her breasts. She thought he might push inside of her as his own desire pressed into her thigh. Instead, he went down the bed again, and his face was on her sex. He pushed one thumb inside, and his tongue flattened against her clit.

She swelled again, her womb felt tight and she could feel the edge of the valley of ecstasy close in. She was about to fall in, and she didn’t want to be saved.

A sheen of sweat was covering her stomach and breasts. Her hand palmed her breast while the other gripped the bedding.

“Oh god, oh Jesus,” she panted. “Oh _fuck_ , Mulder!”

His thumb searched inside for the right angle. He wiggled it inside of her until suddenly he was pushing on the side of her vagina. He found a spot she didn’t know existed. Her body went taught while the edge overtook her, and she found a long fall into her release.

“Oh my god!” she yelled.

She was coming, but she was coming longer and harder than she had in her life.

She had never experienced such ecstasy. She was crying out Mulder’s name to God and asking him to fuck her at the same time. Mulder’s tongue and hands were relentless as her back arched off the bed. This was an orgasm that was drawing out. Her nerves were on fire. Her sex was so tight she didn’t know it was possible. He was still working his tongue against the flesh around her clit, and she thought it was the strangest kind of irony that she was almost thirty-five and finally experiencing the kind of orgasm she had always heard her friends talk about.

“Fuck,” she whimpered as her body went limp, and he sat up a bit to look at her.

She opened her eyes to see Mulder wiping the evidence of her orgasm off his chin.

“Sorry,” she muttered with pinked cheeks.

“I like how you taste,” Mulder got off the bed to take a drink of water from one of the bottles on the table. “I’m not sure you would understand the reasoning behind it because if I describe it, it might make me sound like a pervert.”

Scully sat up on the bed and reached out for the bottle. Mulder handed her the plastic phial, and she took a long drink.

“I’d like to hear about that,” she told him as he sat on the bed near her.

“You want to hear about how you taste?” he questioned, and she shrugged. “Or the perverted part?”

Scully rolled her eyes. “Mulder-”

“I like that you taste sweet like fruit but not quite. I like that you respond to me,” he continued. “And I really really really like the way your pussy looks.”

“ _Jesus Christ_ ,” she lamented. “That’s so-”

“It’s true.” He shrugged as he took the water from her and set it on the bedside table. He sat in the middle of the bed next to her and looked at her with complete openness. “Say what you want, but for all that I’ve seen, yours is pretty nice to look at.”

That was an embarrassing thought. She put one hand over her face to shake her head, and he pulled it away to catch her eye.

“You shouldn’t feel… anything but a weird sense of pride about that,” he advised her as he kissed the inside of her wrist. “Truly and comparatively, you’re amazing to look at _everywhere_.”

“Do you want me to tell you how beautiful your dick is?” she proposed, and he nodded with a smile. “You are a pervert.”

He looked down at his dick that was still standing straight up and then back to her. “It’s not?”

Scully sighed and pushed him on his back. Her leg swung over his hips, and she sat on his thighs to take his cock in her hand.

“I would have to say comparatively to other male organs I’ve seen in my personal and professional life that you have a very nice one, yes,” she affirmed.

He grinned. “How many have you seen in your-”

Scully waved a hand in front of her face. “ _Mulder_ -”

“So… Is this going to be comfortable for you like this,” he asked, gesturing to their position.

Scully raised her hips up and put one hand on the bed near his head. He looked between them, and her eyes followed his gaze as they watched him slowly enter her.

She bit her lip as the familiar pinch of intrusion began and blew air out of her mouth while he inched inside.

“Jesus Christ, I forgot how _tight_ you are,” he moaned as she paused with only an inch inside.

“You forgot?” she clarified.

Mulder squeezed her hip. “I can’t replicate that tightness with my hand. My survival instincts tell me not to _abuse_ myself like that.”

Scully sunk down another inch and moved up a little. “I understand….”

Her hips moved up and down on the small real estate of his dick that she had already had inside of her, then down another inch.

“Do you- _fuck_ \- you do know?” he asked.

Maybe their foreplay was this back and forth repartee of verbal sparring that had maintained their relationship over the last six years.

“You’re not packing _standard-issue_ equipment,” she commented, and he gave her a proud smirk. “I wouldn’t find something _this_ size to use… on myself.”

“Really?” he managed through clenched teeth and heavy breath.

She moved her hips up and then sunk all the way down to the hilt.

“Fuck!” they cried in unison.

He was pushing inside of her and her body was aching as she tried to adjust to the intrusion of such a thing as Fox Mulder’s dick. If she was by herself, she might laugh at the thought.

Five years ago when they had gotten back on the X-Files, the survival from her abduction had turned her into a piece of glass in his eyes that she had to repeatedly prove to him she was far from. For her, it had suppressed her sex drive for months. No one in the MUFON group told her about that part.

These days, she was overwhelmed with desire for Mulder that was mixed with frustration and longing. She wanted to yell at him for his blind trust in Diana and his ignorance to the science. When he told her that she was making it personal, her chest tightened. What else did she have without the X-Files or her job at the FBI? She had him.

Mulder pinched her hip, and she turned her focus back to him.

“Where did you go?” he asked as the hand moved from her hip to her breast.

Scully looked at him in the eye and worried if she told him the truth, it might bring up other hard truths that she didn’t want to face.

“I was thinking about why we hadn’t done this sooner,” she commented.

Mulder’s shaft twitched once inside of her, and her body adapted a little more. “Like in Kroner?”

If Mulder had made a move on her then, she didn’t know how she would respond. It would have been nice to make up there, but she wasn’t sure they were ready.

In all likelihood, the recent events with Diana would haven broken them because he would have still taken her side. Scully didn’t want Mulder to take her side because of sex. She wanted him to see that she was right because he actually trusted her instincts more than the woman who left a ‘Dear Fox’ letter at the front door. That letter was held in a tube with the ring she bought to match the one she made him wear, even though they weren’t married.

When Mulder dropped that little tidbit, it took everything she had not to make a comment. It never occurred to her to ask a boyfriend to wear a ring to keep other women at bay or to remind him that he wasn’t single. If any man didn’t want to be with Dana Scully, it didn’t change her life regardless. The only man she had ever chased after in her entire life was Fox Mulder.

What did that say about them?

“Do you think you had a shot in Kroner?” she asked him with an arched eyebrow.

Mulder rolled them over so she was on her back, and he flexed his pelvis to push even deeper inside. Scully made a guttural noise that wasn’t very ladylike, but it made him grin.

“I would have liked to have tried,” he confessed as his face buried in her neck and kissed the skin there.

She might have to wear a high-collared shirt when she got to D.C. if he kept this up.

“Mulder, I’m not trying to quash your dreams about what could have been-”

“Then don’t,” he cut her off and pumped his hips twice. They were hard and full strokes, but it felt like he was somehow deeper than before.

Another guttural sound came from the back of her throat, and she couldn’t tell if her cheeks were hot from embarrassment or from the state of arousal she was in.

Mulder’s upper arms were supporting him, and she had a clear shot down their bodies to the spot they were joined. She looked from his face to where he was pumping steadily, and she couldn’t help but let out a wavering sigh as her tongue slowly moved from one corner of her mouth to the other.

Every thrust into her core was a welcomed infraction from a man who had pushed his way into her life since 1993. This was the final step as he took over her completely with his hands, his mouth and his cock.

She was overwhelmed with sensations as he dropped to his elbows, his mouth nipping along her clavicle and his right hand squeezing her breast. He arched his back slightly, and he whispered something against her skin.

“Wha-” she attempted as his pumping grew more forceful.

“Touch yourself,” he urged her. “I want to feel you come while I’m fucking you like this.”

She took a breath and caught the dark look in his eyes. The right hand that had been holding onto his back moved between them, and she jerked at the initial touch.

“ _Oh_ ,” she sighed as the slippery evidence of her desire coated her middle finger.

Her sex was swollen against her hand, and as she pressed on her centre, she brushed against Mulder’s enlarged flesh. Everything about this time felt heightened between them. She had never felt such exquisite pain and pleasure at the same time.

“Come on, Scully,” he urged her. “I want to feel you come.”

As she began to move her finger across her sex, Mulder groaned.

“Fuck, _how_ did you get tighter?” he managed and paused his movements. He pushed himself up on his palms and watched her as she was touching herself. “It looks really good to watch you do that.”

Scully’s finger slowed as she moved around his dick with her fingers and felt her sex swell even more. Her skin was on fire. Her body was shaking. Out of selfishness, she wanted to reach the edge of that precipice again and again before it was all over, and they had to decide what this all meant for them.

As long as they were in that hotel room, joined as they were and moving against one another, she could delay the oncoming conversations about what would happen when they got back to D.C.

“I should have known you would like to watch,” she commented with a low pitch.

“I could watch you do that for the rest of my life,” he replied and let out a shaking breath.

She didn't want to think about the weight of that statement. 

He flexed his hips, and they both moaned in unison. Mulder rocked against her, and her eyes grew wide. He was so deep inside of her, right at her cervix, that she might break in two.

As he moved onto his knees to push her up so her back was curved and her knees were up to her breasts, he held her thighs and began to hammer into her.

Her hand never left her sex, and she heard small mewling noises coming from the back of her throat that she had never made before. If this was the last time they had sex, this would certainly be a doozy. Nothing else was going to compare to him and this moment.

Unless… this wouldn’t be the last time together, and she wouldn’t have to spend the rest of her life wondering if he could possibly top this moment.

Mulder slid his hands up her legs to hold her ankles wide, but his hips never stopped moving. She looked down at her fingers as they rubbed on her swollen lips, and he grunted as he thrust harder than before.

Maybe he was going for some kind of record.

The sounds of their moans and their sexes sliding against each other filled the room. She could see the sweat along his chest as he relentlessly pushed into her.

“Scully-” he started and rocked hard before his hips began jack hammering into hers.

It was the speed and the force with her own play on her clit that had her writhing on the mattress and sending her over the edge.

“Oh god!” she cried out. “Oh, _Mulder_!”

“Fuck,” he growled as he continued to fuck her.

As she felt herself spiraling down, she felt him quaking inside of her. He was coming too, and it was filling her womb with the hot evidence of his own orgasm. Her own release had made their joining slick and wet.

There would be a giant mess on the bed.

Mulder grunted as he thrust one last time with such force she had never felt before, and she cried out.

He let go of her legs and looked down at her as she was splayed out underneath him. “Fuck.”

Scully nodded shakily.

“I’m going to need to do that again,” he told her and cleared his throat.

_Oh Jesus, now?_

“Not right now,” he assured her with a grin, and she wondered if maybe she said that out loud. Mulder pulled out of her with a wince. “Stay there. I’ll get a towel.”

Scully tried to keep it all inside of her, but she could feel it wanting to leak out and mess the bed.

He returned from the bathroom with a washcloth and his swollen flesh swinging in the air. He really was well endowed, and it perplexed her mind how that fit inside of her.

“Do you need help getting up?” he asked as he handed her the cloth. He looked down to her sex and smiled. "Or any of that?"

“No,” she started and tried to wipe away as much as possible. She slowly got off the bed and walked to the bathroom.

When she returned, Mulder was standing in the middle of the room, drinking a bottle of water with his hand on his hip. He was still hard.

“That’s… still going on,” she commented as she grabbed her own water to drink. “Is that normal for your body?”

“Yeah, I think it wants to try again,” he said with a cough. His eyes took in her nakedness, and he grinned at her. “I think I’ll need like twenty minutes before that’s possible.”

“Twenty minutes?” she repeated.

Mulder leaned down to kiss her cheek, placing one hand on her hip as he did so. “Yeah. Unless you had other plans for this evening? Maybe you wanted to catch some local Tallahassee theatre?”

Scully raised an eyebrow and went to find their clothes. As she picked up the pile of pants, underwear and shirts, Mulder took them from her, placed them on the chair and sat on the bed.

He pulled her to stand between his legs, kissed the tops of her breasts and palmed her backside.

She was getting aroused again, but they needed to talk. What did all this mean? They said they loved each other, but she didn’t want a codependent relationship of living together and working together. She still needed her space, and she assumed he would as well.

His lips captured her nipple between his teeth, and he paid special attention to one while his palm slid up her side to massage her other breast.

“Mulder…” she protested.

The hand that was on her backside slid between her legs. He pushed two fingers inside of her.

“Oh!” she cried out. “Mulder-”

“I’ve had the last six months to think about all the ways I wanted you,” he explained as his mouth moved along her chest.

He suckled at the other breast, and his fingers flexed inside of her. His shaft twitched against her leg, and her head dropped back. She was still swollen and wet. Or was she swollen and wet again? She couldn’t tell. Her body didn’t have much time to cool down from their lovemaking only minutes ago, and he was doing things to her that were driving her crazy with desire.

Just when she thought she understood what he was doing, he turned her around and began to use his fingers to fuck her from behind while the other held her breast tightly. If he let go, she might fall to her knees. She needed something to hold on to but all she had was him.

“You can’t blame me,” he told her as he kissed her lower back. He slipped another finger inside of her, and she moaned loudly. “Before Antarctica, I had thought about it from time to time, but now when I make myself come, I think of doing all of this to you.”

“Mulder-” she started, but she wasn’t sure what to say. “I need… oh god, I need to lie down.”

“No,” he denied with a laugh. “I need you like this first.”

The hand on her breast began massaging the flesh and pinching her nipple. Mulder’s fingers sped up, and she could hear the slickness of her sex as his fingers moved in and out of her. She never came from just this, but she was lightheaded and shaking from his actions, regardless.

“Can you touch yourself, Scully?” he asked her as his fingers left her. He stood up with his length pressed into her back. He moved the hand that was inside of her to her right hand and pressed them to her sex. “Or would you rather me?”

He was so confident in this as he played her skillfully like a string musician. He plucked at her chords while her knees buckled.

“What…” she started. “Why…”

Clearly, the English language had left her.

Mulder maneuvered them around to face the bed and gently pressed his palm into her back so that she would lean over. She was quiet and compliant from a sensory overload.

He pressed his shaft into her backside, and she felt how hard he was again. Mulder rubbed the head against her folds, and she could feel a bit of her desire fall out of her. Mulder’s thumb ran up her sex, and he pushed the head of his cock inside. Leaning over on the bed with her ass exposed to him in this position, she had zero power, but she didn’t want it.

“Uh,” she started and looked over her shoulder to watch his face as he entered her again.

Again. He pulled out slightly and pushed in again. And again. He was rocking against her slowly and pumping with steady strokes.

He was fucking her again as his thumb, slick with her desire, pushed on her other hole.

_No._

His thumb rubbed against her backdoor and she shook. The first joint of his thumb pushed inside her, and she began quaking.

“Good?” he asked lightly, and she shook her head.

It was a damned lie. It was _amazing_ , but she didn’t want to admit that to him, herself or God.

He slipped his thumb in further, and she cried out. “Good?”

“ _Yes_ ,” she managed weakly.

How was he so hard again? There had to be a science behind his refractory time. How did he know she would like having his thumb in there? She didn’t even know that.

“It takes me longer to come the second time,” he told her as he held her hips and thrust twice. Mulder’s palms smoothed over her backside that was exposed to him, and he pumped his hips once more. “Just let me know if you need a break.”

What the hell had she just gotten herself into? Was he trying to go for a record for marathon fucking in Tallahassee?

His thumb flexed, and she cried out again.

“I like that you like that,” he told her. He leaned down and kissed the skin on her back. “Gives me ideas for the next time.”

Jesus, next time?

He stood up and began a slow, steady rhythm. Her elbows shook, and she fell to them on the bed. Mulder grunted and kept up his pace. She looked between her legs where her breasts were shaking with each thrust to see his balls slapping against her ass.

He picked up the pace and pushed his thumb in her deeper.

Why the fuck-

“ _Oh Jesus Christ you motherfucker_!” she cried out as she felt an orgasm overtake her.

“Yes,” he growled and fucked her harder.

Her walls were clenching down, but it didn’t stop the hard pounding from his dick into her.

This time was animalistic and rough. He wasn’t being tender. He wasn’t taking special care for being slow. He was making her his, and she wasn’t sure how she could declare they could be anything outside of this ever again.

She knew exactly what he was doing. Mulder was making sure that this would always be between them, and she hated him a little bit for that. She couldn’t retreat while he had both of her holes filled, making her come from this kind of fucking.

“You….” Mulder started. “You gotta come again.”

“I’m-” she started.

He pumped harder, and his thumb started moving in unison. This was out of character for her to be so lost in the rapt desires. She was exposed to him completely, and he had total control.

“Come on,” he urged. “Come on, Scully.”

It was as he was fucking her, she felt another wave of pleasure overtake her, and she yelled out his name. His thumb released, and he grabbed both hips to fuck her even harder.

She could feel him so deep inside of her. She didn’t know how she could sit tomorrow or walk or do anything. This man was going to tear her apart.

“Fuck!” he yelled, and she could feel him coming again.

He pumped hard and erratically. She was crying out with each thrust. He wasn’t stopping, and she was shaking on her elbows for a break. Her breasts bounced with each time he pulled her hips back against his pelvis. The force of her body moving in tandem with his thrusts was bruising her inside, but she didn’t mind it one bit.

“You…are… so…” he managed as he pushed one last time. “Fuck, I love you.”

He kissed her back and squeezed her breast as he quaked inside of her. She was overwhelmed and satiated to a point she never had in her life. She never would have imagined this happening tonight, but she couldn't say she was sorry it did.

After they had both cleaned up, Mulder sat in his boxers eating pizza with the television on and his feet propped on the bed. He had a beer in hand and the remote on his thigh as he flipped through the channels.

The abdominal muscles were prominent in that position, and his cheeks were a little pink from the effort he had put into fucking her.

If this was a picture of domesticity, it wasn’t bad. Scully pulled her old school shirt back over her head and sat at the table to eat more of the greek salad. She picked out two black olives she missed the first time onto a napkin with a face of disapproval.

“When is our flight tomorrow?” Scully asked as she skewered a cucumber and red onion onto her plastic fork.

Mulder ran his tongue along his molars and sat up a little. “I think the message said ten-thirty.”

Scully found her phone from her bag, dialed her voicemail and put the phone on speaker. She put in her pin code and waited for the message.

“This is a message for Dana Scully and Fox Mulder. We have confirmed your flight from Tallahassee to Washington, D.C., departing at ten thirty-five a.m. from Tallahassee International to Ronald Reagan Airport. Your tickets will be waiting at the counter under your names. Thanks again for choosing American Airlines.”

Scully pressed the ‘save’ key, and her voicemail told her the message would be saved for three days. She didn't need to save the message, but out of fear she could possibly get the information wrong, she did so anyway.

“Hi Dana, it’s Tom Henderson from George Washington U. I wanted to touch base with you after our last conversation about a job-”

Scully pressed the speaker button on the phone, and her cheeks pinked.

“Job?” Mulder asked as his attention shifted from the basketball game to her. “Were you looking at jobs?”

Scully pressed the appropriate number to save the message. “I was…”

“ _When_?” he asked.

She could tell that he was trying to keep his voice calm, but Mulder’s tells were known to her. He clenched his jaw as he took a breath, a sign he was attempting to prevent an overreaction. If they ever played poker together, she might clean him out from knowing his face so well, especially when he was lying.

“Last year,” she replied with a sigh. “When we were on assignment with Michaud. I contacted him again when we were suspended from the FBI.”

Mulder furrowed his brow. “That fast, hey? I thought when they wanted to transfer you to Salt Lake City that was the first time you had thought about leaving the FBI. I'm kind of blown away, Scully. Why didn't you tell me?”

She didn’t know how to answer that. Working alongside Mulder was exciting as long as they were working on the X-Files. The last few months on manure duty with Kersh had forced her to open her options. After she was shot by Peyton Ritter, her mother begged her to quit. She called Dr. Tom Henderson, who she had met at the last medical convention she went to, to appease her mother.

“I wasn’t _seriously_ looking,” she tried to explain. “My mother-”

“Wants you to quit the FBI,” he finished for her and downed the rest of his beer. “Because it’s dangerous and unfulfilling.”

“Mulder, I mean this sweetly,” she tried.

“It’s not personal?” he guessed as he reached down to the pack by his chair and opened another one while he held his pizza in his teeth. As he tossed the cap to the table, he gave her a look.

“It was more about my mother and being bored,” she attempted again. “I was miserable working under Kersh. I felt like we were shut off from each other. I just wanted-”

“I think you’re about to hurt my feelings,” he cut her off again and took a swig. Scully said nothing and allowed him to finish working through the problem in his mind. “Do you want to take the job?”

“We have the X-Files back,” she reminded him and took a drink of her water. “I want to work with _you_ on the X-Files.”

“What if we hadn’t just-” Mulder asked as he waved towards the bed. “Would you have left?”

“I’m not sticking around for potential sex with you, if that’s what you’re asking,” she replied as she sat up a little straighter. “I'm not some doe-eyed school girl who would change her career for a man. I don't think you realize this but I wouldn’t have stayed if you and I slept together before the bee stung me.”

“Why did you stay?” he asked.

He was asking her as though the work wouldn’t be enough to keep her interest this time around. That bothered her.

“Mulder, you know what those bees were carrying. The contents on the ship in Antarctica and the cover up needs to be exposed,” she reminded him. “Our personal relationship outside of that doesn’t change our work.”

“This feels like the conversation in Casey Station all over again,” he muttered.

“Why does this bother you?” She got up and walked over to Mulder, kneeling down next to him. “Mulder, look at me.”

He moved his eyes from the television to her. All of his doubts and fears were written all over his face, and she folded her hands on his right thigh.

“What we said to each other changes things for me, but only in the fact that I have some fears about working together,” she began, and he opened his mouth to protest. “That being said, I’m not going anywhere. Not when we just got the X-files back, and we have a year’s worth of work to catch up on.”

It didn’t seem to appease him, but he nodded anyway. Mulder took another sip of his beer and eyed her cautiously. “Just tell me if you’re thinking of putting in your notice. I don’t want to be surprised one day with a new partner who doesn’t laugh at the jokes I’ve curated over the years.”

Scully huffed a laugh and shook her head. “Sure, thing.”

Mulder gave her ass a squeeze as she walked back to her seat at the table, and she gave him a look.

“Don’t make me hurt you,” she warned him with a finger up.

“I need to get it out of my system before we get back to the office,” he defended with his hands up.

Falling into bed with Mulder wasn’t a mistake. Not taking the job at George Washington University was also not a mistake, but maybe they weren’t past everything between them yet. She felt a heaviness in the air that she could tell they were both avoiding. She assumed Mulder would be the first to want to confront it, talk about it and air it out so he could feel better.

“Hey, Scully,” Mulder called to her, and she looked up from her salad. “You wanna go for three?”

She sat up a little straighter. “I don’t want to inflate your ego, but I will need to be able to sit tomorrow so, no thank-you.”

He shrugged. “So… then I guess I need to ask-”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “What?”

“If Diana hadn’t been around when we lost the X-Files, do you think you would have wanted to…” Mulder gestured between them. “Since Casey Station?”

“You mean, if your ex wasn’t constantly hanging around, calling you by your first name while I struggled with our situation like our relationship meant nothing-”

“Scully,” he admonished.

“Would I have showed up at your apartment one night with takeout, beer and a lab report you had been waiting on for more than just work in mind?” she finished without missing a beat.

Mulder thought about it for a moment and then nodded. “Yeah… could all of this have started last Christmas under the mistletoe or something?”

She didn’t want to tell him the truth. “Probably.”

“Why?” he asked as he stood up and walked over to where she was sitting.

“Because feeling like someone’s second choice has not been a fond emotion for me,” she told him quietly as he pulled her to stand. “The FBI, working with you, being here with you are all my first choices. I’m not swayed by anything, even more lucrative job opportunities.”

“Can you give me a little more credit than that?” he asked as he wrapped his arms around her. “If you have doubts about us-”

“Look, Mulder,” she started with a harder tone than she intended, and she wrapped her arms around him to try to adjust her attitude. She softened it and sighed when she said, “I want to believe you and in us, but I need proof. Promises post-coitus mean little while you’re basking in the afterglow and hoping for a third round.”

“Oh… so I have my work cut out for me then,” he replied knowingly. “I guess I’m used to _that_.”

“I guess so,” she whispered into his chest.

The statement hung in the air until the game went to commercial. Mulder picked up the remote and changed the channel to a black and white movie, knowing full well she couldn’t resist sitting on the bed with him and watching as the stories played out in front of them.

That was the problem with sleeping with someone after they knew all of your tells too. She hoped it wouldn’t end up biting her in the ass.


End file.
